What shape is a raindrop?

Raindrops are spherical shaped, not like a teardrop.

   'Ball-bearing' and 'lead-shot'makers take advantage of this phinomenon of the falling liquid's shape in their manufacturing process. Molten lead is dripped through a copper sieve (strainer) from a towering height into a cool liquid and the finished product is a perfectly spherical lead shot or ball bearing.

   Shot drop towers used to be built for this purpose until the Festival of Britain raised alarm to the fact that one was next to Waterloo Bridge in London.
   The tallest shot-drop tower is the Clifton Hill Shot Tower (1878) in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia and stands (to this day) at 160 metres tall

How High is Cloud Nine?

Cloud 9 isn't the furthest in the air, cloud 0 is.
   According to the International Cloud Atlas scale, Cloud 0 (the Cirrus) is the highest type of cloud. It can be as high as 40,000 feet (12,000 metres) in the air.
   Cloud 9, the massive thundercloud (Cumulonimbus) is at the bottom of the scale because a single cloud can cover the whole range from as low as a couple hundred feet to the very edge of the stratosphere (about 50,000 feet or 15,000 metres).
   As with the origins of most phrases, its unlikely that 'cloud nine' can not be attached to just one specific source. There have also been recorded, clouds seven, eight and thirty nine, so it's more likely that people settled on 'nine' because it's considered a lucky number (phrases like 'the whole nine yards' or 'the cat with nine lives' commonly use reference of the number nine, a trinity of trinities). Also, the idea of riding on a big, surging cloud definately seems appealing to the mind.
   The Internatioal cloud Atlas was published in 1896 after The International Meteorological Conference established a cloud committee to agree on an international system for the naming and identification of the various clouds.
   The ten categories, were based on the pioneering work of Luke Howard, an english chemist who published his essay on The modification of clouds in 1802, influnced by his experience of freak weather conditions as a child.
   Clouds are suspended collections of tiny water droplets or ice crystals in the Earth's atmosphere. These droplets/crystals are formed within the condensed state of water vapour and they surround particles of things like smoke or salt, called condensation nuclei.

   Cirrus clouds are the only clouds in the sky completely made of ice crystals. They are mostly formed by the condensation trails of high flying jets and they help to regulate the earth's temperature.

  When air traffic was stopped after 9/11, daily temperatre variation grew by up to 3°C over the 48 hour period as the cirrus protection began to deteriorate; letting in more sunlight at day, and letting out more heat at night.

how many moons does the earth have?

The earth has one main moon plus six others.
   It is certain that Luna (as astronomers call the moon) is the only celestial body to follow a strict orbit of the earth, but currently there are six other 'Near Earth Asteroids' which do follow the Earth around the sun, though cannot be spotted with the naked eye.
   Also called 'co-orbitals', the first of these to be discovered was Cruithne (Cru-een-ya), a three mile wide satellite. it was discovered in 1997 and named after Britain's earliest recorded Celtic tribe. It has a horseshoe shaped orbit.
   Since then, six more have been identified; The 2000 PH5, 2000 WN10, 2002 AA29, 2003 YN107 and the 2004GU9.
   Many astronomers would argue that these aren't moons, but are cetainly more than just the average asteroid. They also take about one year to orbit the sun (it's like two  runners running around a track in different lanes and at the same speed) and every now and then they would come close enough to exert a very slight gravitational influence.
   So whether it be quasi satellites, pseudo-moons or companion asteriods (as scientists have it), they are worth monitoring; maybe some, or even all of them would one day achieve a more regular orbital pattern.

What makes champagne fizz?

Nooo, it ain't Carbon Dioxide, it's dirt!
   Carbon dioxide particles would evaporate invisibly in a perfectly smooth and clean glass, so for a long time scientists had accepted that it was slight imperfections in production of the glass that made the bubbles form.
   Howbeit, advancement in photographic techniques have now displayed that these demerits in design were much too small for the bubbles to latch onto. What causes these bubbles are the microscopic particles of dust and fragments of fluff that enable them to form in the glass.
   Practically speaking, the 'dirt' in the glass act as condensational nuclei for the dissolved CO2

  According to Moët et Chandon, there are about 250million bubbles in a bottle of champagne. It was believed to be first invented by Dom Perignon, a Benedictine monk at the Abbey of Hautvillers in the 17th century, purely by mistake! Unlike wine, that is made up of one type of grapes, champagne is made from three types of grapes; one variety of white grapes, the Chardonnay and two varieties of black grapes, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier.

Chardonnay

   What's interesting is that, despite of its white colour, champagne is mostly made up of black grapes! The black grapes are pressed just enough to extract no more than the juice and the skin chucked into caskets in the wine cellar, to undergo fermentation.
   The pressure in a champagne bottle is three times that of a car tire, measuring at ninety pounds per square inch.
   The velocity at which the cork leaves the bottle has been recorded to be between 38-40 mph (61-64kmph). It can pop out at up to 100 miles per hour. The furthest flight-distance of a champagne cork was a recorded 177 feet, 9 inches, done by American Heinrich Medicus in 1988.
   Marilyn Monroe is believed to have taken a 'champagne bath', using about 350 champagne bottles to fill the bathtub.
   The world's tallest champagne bottle is about seven feet upright and has the capacity to fit up to 22 normal-sized bottles of champagne. It was unveiled at a festival in Italy.
   There is a rumour that a few bottles of Heidsieck & Co. Monopole Blue Top Champagne Brut was recently recovered from the wreckage of the Titanic and still tasted great!
 

How many senses do we have?

The human being possesses at least nine senses.
   The five senses w learn at school - sight, taste, smell, touch and hearing - were first listed by Aristotle, who while at times can be scintillating often made some deficient mistakes. (Eg. he taught that we thought with our hearts, that flies had only four legs and that bees came from rotting bull carcasses).
   There are four more prevalent senses that we have

1. Proprioception, from the Latin word proprius, meaning 'one's own' is the unconscious knowledge of where our body parts are, without the need to see or touch them as well as the knowledge of the strength of effort being employed in movement.
2. Equilibrioception is the sense of balance. It's determined by the fluid containing cavities (such as the cochlea and semi-circular canals) found in the inner ear.
3. Nociception is the acumen (feeling) of pain from the joints, skin and organs. Quaintly, the brain isn't apart of this sense; it has no nociceptors (pain receptors) at all. Regardless of how it may seem, headaches don't happen inside the brain.
4. Thermoception is the sense of heat (or its absence) in our body. mammals have at least two receptors; one to detect heat (temperatures above body heat) and cold (temperatures below body heat).

   Every contemptuous neurologist has their own opinion as to the correct number of senses that we have, whether more or less than the nine. Some argue that there are up to twenty one. Senses like hunger, thirst, depth, even the senses of meaning and language have been argued to be added to the list. A very fascinating one is synasthesia, where senses are combined to perceive, days of the week, or letters to give off a sense of emotion or colour!

   There is also the sense of approaching danger (when your hair stands up), or even the sense of electricity.

    Some senses that other animals have that we don't are magnetoception (sense of magnetic fields), experienced by bees and other insects and electroception, which allows sharks to sense electric fields. Infrared vision is used by snakes and deer to hunt or feed at night and echolocation is used by dolphins to navigate and for foraging (hunting).

Who first discovered that the world was a sphere?

It's not so much of who, but what? Bees figured it out, no problem.
   Honeybees have created a very intricate language to communicate the location of the best nectar, with reference from the sun. Astonishingly enough, they can do this on overcast days as well as at night; this done by calculating the position of the sun on the other side of the world. This indicates that honey bees can actually learn and store information regardless of having a brain 1.5 million times smaller than ours.
   There are about 950,000 neurones in a bee's brain as opposed o the nearly 200billion neurones found in the human brain.
   Honeybees have a congenital 'map' of the sun's movement across the sky over 24 hours and can modify it to fit their geographical conditions very quickly; within 5 seconds they know where they're headed.
   The honeybee is also the most sensitive creature there is to the Earth's magnetic field. They use this sense to maneuver about and also to make the honeycomb panels of their hives. If a strong magnet is placed next to a hive under construction, the result is a strange cylindrical comb, unlike anything found in nature. The hive's temperature is exactly the same as that of the human body (37°C).
   Bees have evolved over 150 million years ago around the same time as the Cretaceous Period when flowering plants had formed. The Apis genus (honeybees) didn't exist until around 25 million years ago and are really a form of vegetarian wasp.

queen bee

 
 Queen honeybees give off a chemical  called 'queen substance'. The substance is smelled by worker bees through their antennae and prevents them from developing ovaries.
   It takes the full lifetime (about a month) of twelve worker bees to make enough honey to fill a teaspoon. a single bee would have to travel about 46,600 miles (almost twice around the world) to produce one pound of honey.
 


Bees will travel as much as seven and a half miles per trip, many times each day to retrieve nectar for the colony. Hence the alliteration, 'as busy as a bee'.

 

How much of the human brain do we actually use?

Three to a hundred percent.

   Most of us have heard that we only use 10% of our brain, which leads to vast discussions about the great things we might be able to if able to harness the other 90 per cent.
   Frankly, all of the human brain is used every once in a while. On another note, a Peter Lennie of the new york University Center for Neural Science indicates that the human brain should optimally have up to 3 per cent of its neurones firing at any one time, any more and the energy needed to 'reset' each neurone after it fires becomes too much for the brain to handle.
   The central nervous system consists of the brain and spinal chord. It's only made up of only two kinds of cells; neurones and glia. Neurones are basically the processors of information, receiving and sending input and output between each other. Input is received through the neurone's dendrites (a branch like structure), whilst output leaves through the cable-resembling axons.
   A single neurone may have as many as 10,000 dendrites, but no more than one axon. The axon may be thousands of times longer than the cell body of its neurone. The largest axon, found on a Giraffe is 15 feet (4.5 metres) long.
   The convergence between axons and dendrites are know as synapses. It's where electrical impulses are transposed into chemical signals. The synapses link  neurones to one another, operating as a switch and making the brain into a very convoluted network that can be turned on and off between each impulse.
   Glia cells accomodate the structural framework of the brain. They act as the caretaker of the brain, removing the debris of cadaverous (dead) neurones. For every one neurone, there are approximately fifty glia.
   There are nearly three million miles (nearly 5,000,000 km) of axons, up to two hundred billion neurones and one quadrillion(1,000,000,000,000,000) synapses in the human brain. if they were to be spread  out side by side, they would cover 25,000 square metres; the size of four football fields.
   There are more ways that information is exchangeable in the brain than the number of atoms in the universe so the brain, if exercised daily, clearly has high potential for greatness. It's up to the possessor to choose how they use theirs.